


(missing me one place, search another) i stop somewhere waiting for you

by The_Blonde



Series: tumblr prompts [1]
Category: Video Blogging RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Criminals, M/M, Mutual Pining, art thieves
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-15
Updated: 2018-01-15
Packaged: 2019-02-22 02:06:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,723
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13156908
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Blonde/pseuds/The_Blonde
Summary: "Me: bored looking tour guide, my hair was green but it isn’t anymore. You: loud, American, red hair. I saw you at New York Movie, you looked at me and I loved you. I thought I was shouting it but apparently you couldn’t hear me. That’s a first. Meet me here. Whenever you want".Or: Art Thieves in love. Sort of. They’re getting there (in an alternate timeline).





	(missing me one place, search another) i stop somewhere waiting for you

**Author's Note:**

> For [eltrkbarbarella](https://eltrkbarbarella.tumblr.com/) who asked for some happy septiplier in the art thief 'verse. hope you like it <3
> 
> Title from "Song of Myself" by Walt Whitman.

Jack realises, after his two months of waiting, when waiting was still a novelty (the poetry of sitting on the crowded steps of the Met, in the golden New York light, trying not to imagine exactly what he would say when Mark appeared), that this city does missed connections slightly differently. For one, he has to speak on the phone, and doesn’t expect the honesty of hearing these things said in his own voice. Writing is easier, you can disguise so much more in writing. Not that he’d never disguised much at all, when it came to Mark.

He speaks to a girl called Maya, who has a voice like sunshine and says _oh dear_ when he’s finished reading, like a tiny sunbeam into his soul. “What placement would you like?”

Jack, on the work phone in a blessedly quiet break room, says, “Sorry?”

“Placement? Like, where on the page do you want it? And what font?”

“ _Font_?” Jack shakes his head so hard that the phone receiver rattles. “It doesn’t really matter about the font.”

“You don’t want me to put some italics on the still waiting’s? It might be more effective.”

“None of them have been that effective.”

Maya, for the first time in the entire conversation, hesitates. “None of them? This isn’t the first one? It sorta reads like the first one.”

“It’s not the first one,” Jack says. “I’ve lost count of which one it actually is.”

“You’re persistant.”

“That’s one word for it.”

\---

_Me: Here. I: Told you I would be. Where are: You. We: didn’t set a time and I: know we probably should have. It’s not right to arrange to meet someone without a time. I’m still waiting. It hasn’t been very long but I’m still waiting. How long will you be? How late will you be? I’ll be here, whenever it is. Still waiting_.

Maya says it’s the saddest missed connection they’ve had in a while, another thing Jack doesn’t like about this whole new process. The Metro never sent him emails back to comment on the tone of his messages, never asked him if he was okay, smooth caramel of sincerity dripping from every letter. “Do you want your name on this?” Maya asks, just after the, “Are you okay?” that Jack had ignored. “We usually put names on them.”

“He’ll know it’s me,” Jack replies.

“I don’t mean to pry,” Maya begins, with the tone of someone who is about to do just that.

Jack hangs up, just as two of his co-workers come into the break room. His shift selection (earliest and latest) always means that he misses his fellow tour guides, or passes right by them. They’re always chatty, he never is. They like to joke about his level of art knowledge, when he never went to fancy colleges and grad schools like they did, he never jokes about anything. He hadn’t wanted that to be the case, he wanted Mark to arrive to a different Jack, one with lots of friends and adoring colleagues, regulars who come back to his tours day after day, a Jack that Mark would feel honoured to have waiting for him.

He calls Maya back, later, just before the evening shift starts. “I need you to add something in.”

She says, “Who’s this?”

Jack gets the usual stab of pain at not having been remembered. It’s not as painful as it used to be, not with the lack of shock, but it hurts all the same. “The missed connection. I phoned earlier.”

“Oh, the waiting guy.”

“Yeah. The waiting guy.”

 _Me: Here. I: Told you I would be. Where are: You. We: didn’t set a time and I: know we probably should have. It’s not right to arrange to meet someone without a time. I’m still waiting. It hasn’t been very long but I’m still waiting. How long will you be? How late will you be? I’ll be here, whenever it is. Still waiting. I shouldn’t have scared you with Rome_.

Maya reads the whole thing back to him. Twice. “Like I said, we usually put names on them.”

The New York missed connections have _a message from:_ at the end of each update. It makes them sound cheery but also, to Jack’s mind, completely negate the point of a missed connection. Even so, he pays extra for top of page placement and buys a copy of the Times on his way back from the Gagosian (a newly acquired Andrew Wyeth in his briefcase).

 _Me: Here. I: Told you I would be. Where are: You. We: didn’t set a time and I: know we probably should have. It’s not right to arrange to meet someone without a time. I’m still waiting. It hasn’t been very long but I’m still waiting. How long will you be? How late will you be? I’ll be here, whenever it is. Still waiting. I shouldn’t have scared you with Rome. A message from Sean_.

He delivers the Wyeth to Felix’s safety deposit box. Felix, as always, has left a note inside (or gotten one of his American employees to do so). The note says _Hi Jack!_ in over the top cursive. They say _Hi Jack!_ 90% of the time, with details of the next job, the painting and the gallery. The other 5% will be the name of a restaurant and a time, where he will then meet Felix (usually wearing something neon, because “it’s New York, Jackie! What else would I wear?”) and listen to Felix talk about himself for two hours while waiting for any mention of Mark.

Jack spends a lot of time waiting for mentions of Mark. On the second lunch, in an awful place where the food was served in tiny cubes surrounded by dry ice, he actually asked, “Hey, do you hear anything from Mark? What’s he up to?”

Felix blinked. “ _Mark_? I don’t know, he sorta dropped out of the game after Modern Rome. I think it freaked him out. Why are you asking? I thought you two were a pair, I thought you were-”

Jack’s poor sad heart fluttered a little at _a pair_ , Felix thinks you’re a pair! “He said he was taking a break, so, I- I just thought you would know.”

“I don’t,” Felix replied, slowly. “It must be one hell of a break. You’re not in contact with him?”

“No, no. I am.”

“One sided missed connections don’t count.”

Jack doesn’t even ask how Felix knows about those. Felix has a way of somehow knowing the small details of everything. “I know they don’t.”

“I could get you a job,” Felix said, one of his rare moments of kindness. “Away from here. Somewhere sunny, maybe, something that would take a while.”

Jack shook his head. “I have to stay here.”

“ _Here_? But it’s _cold_ and you’re _working_. Like an actual job, you don’t need one of those.  I can get you a job.”

“I have to stay here.”

Felix left it a very long time, one perfect cube of steak into a perfect cube of chocolate fudge cake into drinks at a bar across the street, before he said, “Why do you have to stay here?”

“He’s meeting me here.”

“He’s keeping you waiting?” Felix watched the slow up and down of Jack’s nod. “You’ve been in the Met for two months though. You’ve been waiting for two months?”

“You don’t think he’s going to come?” Jack asked, because he didn’t have (and still doesn’t have) anyone to ask that question to. Felix is the wrong audience, they’re not friends, they’re, what, business colleagues, pretending to have a working lunch and ignoring the fact that Felix had brought another list of New York based artwork that he wants Jack to acquire for him. Jack knows that Felix would leave them all and run away to the Bahamas at the first sign of any trouble. “You don’t think-”

“No,” Felix said. “I don’t.”

\---

At the end of the second month, a series of careful ticks on a wall calendar, Jack dyes his hair brown. It doesn’t feel right to keep it green, even though the green had faded and only reflected the light from certain paintings. It was a colour he had chosen to match Mark, a childish plea for Mark’s attention, the kind lines of Mark’s face softening as he said, “We look like crayons,” and skimmed the side of his hand across Jack’s fringe. “A pair of crayons.” The brightness of it suited Mark more, because _he_ was bright, a sweeping comet through the rainclouds Jack kept around his head.

Jack loved Mark in a constantly surprising way. He’d loved him on sight, with his hair and his kind face and his voice, right in front of New York Movie. Jack had been trying to run a tour group, hesitated on seeing Mark, caught by the volume of his presence, Mark looked at him and Jack loved him. A statement of fact that made his heart sigh. And it happened every time, in front of every painting, on every job. Mark would look at him and Jack would think _wow, I love you_. Always surprising and completely inevitable. The sighs of his heart started to feel more like groans.

“I’ll meet you,” Mark said, after he’d said, “I’m going to take a break. For a while. I think you should too,” which itself had come after a job that Jack had misjudged, the whole of Modern Rome in his hands, a gift that Mark didn’t accept. “I promise I’ll meet you.”

Jack was halfway through tapping his Oyster card to the ticket barrier. “What? Where?”

“Where do you want to meet me?”

“ _Anywhere_.”

Mark inhaled sharply. “Jack.”

“Anywhere. Just tell me where and when.”

“New York. The Met.”

Jack waited. “That’s just a where.”

“I’ll tell you the when.”

Jack stopped tapping his card, only realising then that Mark had never intended to come with him. He was still stood ten paces away from the station entrance. Jack stepped out of the crowd of people waiting to join the circle line and said, “That doesn’t sound promising.”

Mark looked at his feet. “I promised. I _promise_. You heard me.”

“But _when_?”

“Soon.”

“Just.” Jack threw his arm out, to nowhere in particular, the tube entrance, Covent Garden behind them, map on the wall to their right. “Just come with me now.”

“We should take a break, Jack. I meant what I said.”

“From the job? That’s fine, we can go anywhere.”

“From the job,” Mark said, “And maybe also from each other. A little bit.”

Jack focused his eyes on the tube map, just over Mark’s shoulder, followed the line from Covent Garden to Holborn to Russell Square, tried to keep his voice as level as he could. “From each other?”

“It might be a good idea.”

“I’m sorry about Modern Rome,” Jack exclaimed, suddenly, surprising even himself. He felt a few people turn their heads to look. He’s not great with vocal control, he never has been, he could probably be heard on the street outside. “I’m sorry. It was a stupid idea and I shouldn’t have done it, but I wanted to _impress_ you.”  


Mark said, “Lower your voice,” which was rich coming from him.

“I wanted to impress you,” Jack repeated, maybe half of decibel quieter.

“You don’t have to impress me.”

“Yes, I do,” Jack replied, baffled by the notion. “I love you.”

Mark made a pained little noise. “You don’t have to impress me. I’m already impressed by you.”

“But you want to leave.”

“I’m not _leaving_ , it’s just a break, I’m taking a break from the situation, we both should. We did too much too quickly, you’re _supposed_ to take breaks.”

“But for how long?”

“I’ll meet you,” Mark said, again. “At the Met. I’ll meet you.”

For someone so loud and colourful, for someone who fills every space that he’s in and becomes the direct focus of every feeling Jack has, Mark has always been pretty good at disappearing into crowds. Fading away like he was never there in the first place. He’d gone somewhere between Jack ducking his head and lifting it again.

Jack’s good at disappearing into crowds too. At being forgotten and not being paid attention to. It’s not so much as a skill as an actual fact of his life. He’s used to Felix sending him police reports after jobs (because Felix always does that, like a proud parent showing off a kid’s drawing) and trying to find the humour in people never being able to decide on a description for him. Felix likes to write _LOL_ and _WTF you have GREEN hair_ in the margins but Jack has passed from thinking that it’s a useful job trait into wondering how he can be so loud and have no one hear him.

\---

“So,” says one of the other tour guides (Megan or Madeline. Or possibly McKenna), like she’s waiting all this time just to get the right moment where both she and Jack will be on break together. “How did you end up here?”

Megan-or-Madeline runs tours that Jack would like to be a guest on. They look happy and fun and she has quizzes in each room where she hands out prizes. Jack just goes off on a lot of tangents and gets distracted. Someone in his group this morning actually covered their ears at one point. He says, “Here?”

“You’re from Ireland, right? What made you come here? Do you have family here?”

“No.”

“Friends?”

“Not really.”

“You just really like New York?”

“No.”

“You moved halfway across the world to a place you don’t like and where you don’t know anyone for no reason?”

Jack says, “I’m meeting someone here.”

“Oh!” Megan-Madeline looks pleased and more than a little relieved. “That’s cool! When do they get here?”

“I don’t know.” She stares at him. “We didn’t really arrange a time.”

“So, you’re just gonna wait here? Until they show up?”

“I suppose so.”

“It sounds like you should have planned that better.”

Jack should have planned a lot of things better, when it came to Mark. He’s usually methodical, sensible. Weighing up all options before he makes decisions. Mark had exploded in the National Gallery of Ireland like a firework, an illumination that Jack couldn’t comprehend, in the quiet little tour guide job that he’d picked up after university (a tick on a list, save some money, see what you want to do). Jack had never looked at anyone and just _wanted_ them before, but he’d looked at Mark and thought that if he didn’t know everything about Mark immediately then he would die (he’s also very dramatic. That one has never changed).

The first thing Mark ever said to him, or yelled at him, was _Oh! Sorry to interrupt!_ , completely sincerely and apologetically. It was pretty apt, now that Jack thinks about. Mark had interrupted everything, in every way possible.

\---

Maya from the Post says, “Sean!” when he’s only read out the first line of the missed connection.

Jack, at the Agora, trying to work out which of the cloud formation paintings Felix wants, says, “You remembered me?” in a very quiet voice that he doesn’t use much anymore.

“Of course! Yours was interesting, I usually only get ones that are like, I saw you on the E train, you were wearing a top hat and I was carrying a saxophone, that sort of thing. Boring.”

“That doesn’t sound all that boring to me.” Jack thinks maybe it’s the middle cloud formation, which already puts him off this job. Paintings hung in between other paintings are the worst. He brushes the frame with his thumb.

“Are you still waiting?”

“Yes.”

“How long has it been?”

“About two months.” Maya inhales sharply. “It’s fine.” Jack looks up, only one security camera and it’s facing directly at the cloud paintings. Great. “I’m keeping myself busy.”

“What happened? Did you get seperated? I meant to ask, what happened in Rome?”

“It wasn’t what happened in Rome it was what happened to Rome. It’s hard to explain. Can I just read you this one? You can pick the font and the placement and whatever, I don’t care.”

 _Me: Still Here. Hi. I said it hadn’t been very long before but that was me just trying to be casual. It’s been a very long time. To me. Where are: You. I: think about that a lot. Are you okay? Are you happy? Are you just waiting for the time to be right? It’s okay if you are but You: could let me know. If that was something you wanted to do. A message from Jack._.

“I thought your name was Sean?”

“Sometimes my name is Sean. Sometimes it’s Jack. It’s mostly Jack, at the moment.”

Maya says, “Right,” with a long drawn out sound on the “i”.

“Jack’s just, like, a disguise I wear when I want.” Jack feels the need to elaborate. _Jack_ , somewhere along the way, had gone from feeling like a comfortable jacket that he’d shrugged on, a jacket that he thought made him look cooler and sound better, into a scarf that was gently choking him.

“When you want to what?"

“It doesn’t matter. Just- you can pick the placement, like I said. And the font, use whatever font you want, pick whatever size. I don’t care. It’s just important that he sees it.

“Did he see the last one?”

Jack hangs up. He still can’t remember which cloud formation painting Felix wants; one is blue, one is purple and one is the bright red of Mark’s hair (that’s the middle one, does Felix want this one or is it just Jack, his thumb still running up and down the frame). He can’t remember and so he steals all three, with the aid of a carefully aimed pebble to the security camera and an extra large pizza box that he loads onto the back of a borrowed moped.

He’s making unsteady progress down 25th street when the alarms start, but he doesn’t feel anything close to fear. He never has. He never gets caught, he never comes anywhere close to being caught. No one ever remembers, no matter how loud and obvious he is it’s never enough. He texts Felix _Got all three_ followed by the cloud emoji, to which Felix immediately replies _I didn’t want all three. I only wanted the green one_.

 _There WAS no green one_ Jack responds.

_Marzia says that I should ask if you’re okay._

_Then ask._

Jack stuffs the paintings, pizza box and all, into the safety deposit box. The _Hi Jack!_ note floats out and catches on the sleeve of his coat. Jack shakes it away. He should have asked Maya to put are you okay, are you happy in capital letters. Or in bold. So Mark knew it was important, knew that this was something Jack needed to know. Where are you. How much time did you need, for this break. What have you been thinking about. Who have you been with. Where _are_ you.  


_Are you okay?_

Jack half drops his phone from shock. Thumps his thumbs against two letters. _No_.

\---

New York Movie wasn’t in harm’s way. It was a painting that Jack spent a lot of time with, on his tour groups, because it was a painting that he liked (and there were very few of those in the gallery). He liked it more when Mark started paying attention to it. He was always there when Jack arrived at it, his little flock of tourists behind him, and politely waited for Jack to get through the Edward Hopper part of his speech. Solitude, regret and loneliness. There was always a lot of volume in Jack’s voice on loneliness. It echoed and made Mark raise his eyebrows. He constantly looked like he wanted to ask Jack a question and Jack would hesitate, just in case, but the question never appeared.

Jack, in the end, asked the first question, which was, “Will you take me with you?” with New York Movie held out, balanced on his open palms. “Take me with you,” and Mark had blinked and frowned and broadcast a hundred emotions across his face before he decided on the expression that he always wore. Kindness with a hint of earnestness, eyes wide and completely genuine. Looking at Jack in a way that he’d never really been looked at before.

Mark’s question, when it finally came, was, “Why?”

Jack, letting them both out through the staff exit, said, “Why what?”

“Why do you want to come with me?”

“I want to.”

“Why with _me_?” Mark caught the door before Jack could open it fully. “You don’t know me. Literally the only thing you know about me is that I’m stealing your painting. And I don’t even know how you worked  that out.”

“Because I was looking at you,” Jack replied, because it was the truth, even if it did make Mark falter in the doorway, even if it made his fingertips curl around New York Movie’s frame. “And you were really obvious. Let me come with you.”

Mark said, “I,” with no words after it, and frowned.

“Do you do this by yourself? Are you always on your own? I could keep you company, if you needed company, I could-”

“Do _you_ need company?”

Jack didn’t hesitate. “Yes.” He’s lied to people, more people than he’d care to think about, lied about his name, his past, where all his art knowledge came from, why he knows how to pick any kind of lock you can find, lies that really only end with the sad hesitation of looking at his own name on a staff badge, not sure if it really belongs to him, but he’s always found it difficult to lie to Mark. Like Mark can somehow see down through all of Jack’s protective layers. “Yes, I do.”

Mark frowned, a sad knotting of his eyebrows that Jack immediately wanted to smooth away. “It’s not- It’s meant to be pretty solitary. This life. My life. You can’t really- it wouldn’t be fair, to take you with me, it’s not fun, I don’t know if you’re thinking it’s fun and exciting, because it’s not, it’s really not, there’s a lot of waiting around and just watching places, and watching people, and-”

“You watched me?” Jack asked, hopefully.

Mark looked surprised that this was even a question. “Of course I did. But, you have to, you don’t-” his fingers clenched and unclenched on the painting’s frame. “You have to know what you’re getting into here, and I don’t know why you would want to even-”

“Do _you_ need company?”

Mark didn’t hesitate either. “Yes.”

“Then take me with you.”

“I don’t even know your name.”

Jack, wearing a gold plated badge with _Sean_ scrolled across it, said, “It’s Jack.”

\---

Maya says, “Hello again!” like he’d never hung up on her last time, like they’d had a perfectly normal conversation. “Any luck?”

Jack wants to be casual, to say _oh nothing really_ with all the fake nonchalance that he wishes he really had about this situation, but what actually comes out of his mouth is, “Why do you remember me?”

Maya, without missing a beat, says, “You have a distinctive voice.”

“You mean I’m loud?”

“I guess. You sorta sound like you’re performing for an audience sometimes.”

“I don’t have an audience. I literally _never_ have an audience.”

“Then I’m not sure who you’re performing for.”

Jack feels something catch in his chest, the pang of a a truth hitting home, two shards of his collapsed heart colliding. “Can I read you the next one? It might be the last one, I can- I mean, I can take a hint.”

“You really think they’re not coming?”

“They would be here by now.”

“Maybe they’re not seeing the messages.”

“Probably.” The break room in the Met is all gold and pine, like the dark inside of a cigar room in a gentleman’s club. It’s warm and cold at the same time. Jack hates it and also spends all of his time there. “He doesn’t read newspapers.”

Maya leaves a very polite pause. “But if he-”

“Can I read it to you?”

“Is this one from Sean or from Jack?”

Jack says, “It’s from me. Just me.”

 _Me: Still Here. Hi. It’s been longer, since the last one. Obviously. I: don’t think you’re coming at all. That’s fine. You: don’t have to. You: really don’t. I: might wait for another month. At a maximum. I: can understand. That you don’t feel. I: can understand. A message from Jack._.

Maya asks, “Did I miss a word after feel?”

Jack isn’t sure. He hadn’t written anything down and can’t remember what he’d wanted to say. _That you don’t feel the same_ probably. _That you don’t feel anything for me. That you don’t feel anything about me at all_. These tiny fragmented sentences, enough to fit in the centre of a page, don’t come anywhere close to saying what he really feels, which is, centered and in perfect font, _I love you. Why aren’t you here_.

To leave it at _you don’t feel_ doesn’t seem right because Mark  feels everything, deeply, right into his soul. He cries when he’s happy and when he’s sad. He cooks when he’s stressed. He’s too loud all the time. He carries paintings gently, like they feel pain, and talks to them, like they can understand what’s happening. He’s overspilling with feelings, all the time. Just not when he’s around Jack.

“You didn’t miss a word,” Jack says.

\---

Mark, on the Isle of Man, a job that had been extremely easy and also one of Jack’s favourites, said, “You can leave, you know, at any time.”

It was windy. Jack’s green hair fluttered around Mark’s red hair, danced like the grass under their feet. “What?”

“If you wanted to,” Mark looked everywhere except Jack, out across the sea, down on the rocks. “I’m not keeping you here. Don’t feel like you have to stay for me.”

Jack had wanted to say _What else would I stay for? Why do you think I’m even here?_. Maybe he did say both of those things, just not quite loud enough for Mark to hear.

The gallery had been pretty and small, with a guest book, and Jack had written _We loved meeting the God of the North Wind_ which, if anyone really looked at it, basically said _We stole your painting_ but Jack hadn’t focused much on anything past the _We_.

“I like being part of a pair,” he told Mark. “That’s never really happened before.”

Mark frowned (he frowned a lot, around Jack, not an angry frown but a concerned one, a puppyish furrow of his forehead). “What do you mean?”

“I’m too loud for most people.”

“That’s-” Mark laughed, a glorious bellow of a laugh that scared some birds down on the beach. “That’s really not going to be a problem with me.”

“I know. I’m just a really weird mix of being loud and also, like, unnoticed. A lot of the time.”

“Hey,” Mark said. “I notice you.”

They stayed on the Isle of Man for too long, enough time to see the police start arriving at the gallery, the newspaper headlines, the journalists. Jack regretted the guestbook entry immediately (or maybe he didn’t. It’s proof that he was here, that he and Mark were here, together) but still talked Mark out of leaving, continually saying, “But I like it here,” in a steady stream of coffee shops and cake shops and boat rides and hillside walks.

He could pretend that he and Mark were a couple, on a weekend break that kept being extended, going back to their rented cottage and making plans for the next day over a bottle of wine. Going to seperate beds in separate rooms where Jack would try and sleep with his hand pressed to the wall between them.

“I notice you,” Mark said, picking up a conversation that had ended days before, while Jack reluctantly started looking at ferry rides back to the mainland. “I don’t know why you think I don’t.”

Jack, brave after two glasses of awful rose, asked, “Notice me how?”

“Notice you _how_?”

“I could tell you how I notice you.”

Mark swallowed. “I don’t-”

“But you already know that.”

“We’ve stayed here too long.” Mark shook his head. “We shouldn’t have stayed this long.”

Jack had signed the guestbook with Sean. Mark watched him do it and never questioned. Never asked. Maybe he assumed it was a fake name, because the message itself was so obvious. Jack used, and still uses, Sean a lot on jobs. His real name has somehow become his best alias. He’s not sure how he feels about Sean anymore. Sean was listless and not sure what he wanted to do with his life. Sean had taken a job in a gallery because it was the only place that actually asked him in for an interview. Sean had fallen in love with a loud American on sight and tried, every day, to try and make the loud American love him back.

Felix, meeting Jack for the first time, said, “This is the stray you adopted?” because Felix is not one for subtlety and doesn’t care about being polite.

Mark said, “I don’t know who adopted who, really,” and Jack didn’t think that he’d ever heard anyone say something so amazing.

\---

“How long is this going to continue?” Felix asks. “This pining? Between you and Dan I’m feeling like I should start a relationship advice column. At least you’re being productive I guess, Dan is just moping around, but, c’mon man. This is getting sad.”

Dan clears his throat. “I’m actually here you know.”

Felix starts hitting something on his keyboard. Jack, with his laptop half balanced on his windowsill to steal his neighbour’s wifi, watches Dan roll his eyes. “This is why I don’t Skype,” Felix says. “I like notes, and letters, and telegrams, and how are you still here?” He squints at Dan. “I’m trying to end your call.”

“Believe me,” Dan says. “I wish you were succeeding.”

Jack hasn’t said anything to Dan yet. If he tries, then he knows that the words will just be a steady stream of you understand, don’t you, what this feels like, you know, you get it, what should I do, am I stupid for waiting, are you waiting. Dan, in a lot of ways, is in a worse situation because he (to the gossip of everyone involved, even Jack had heard and Jack doesn’t pay attention) had fallen in love with a security guard. The person he was stealing from. Apparently Dan was now out of action after doing irretrievable damage to a Degas on a failed job but before that he’d been pretty decent, as far as Jack can tell. Mark had spoken about him sometimes, with fondness and pride, and Jack had been horribly jealous of him based on that alone.

“And I’m not moping,” Dan adds. “I quit. You remember? I told you I wasn’t doing this anymore.”

“To wait for him?” Jack asks.

Dan looks at him through the smudge of Jack’s screen. Felix in background says, “Again with the _waiting_ , oh my _god_ ,” as Dan, very carefully, mumbles, “Not exactly. He doesn’t know where I am. So I can’t wait for him.” Jack wonders if Mark and Dan speak, if they have each other’s numbers. He wants to ask, he almost does ask, he’s about to, but Dan beats him to it. “With Mark, I think, you just need to give him time.”

“ _Time?_ ”

Dan shifts awkwardly back and forth. “Yeah.”

“Do you speak to him?” finally tumbles out of Jack’s mouth. “At all?”

Dan carries out another series of awkward motions, hands fluttering everywhere before eventually pulling at the collar of his t-shirt. “No.” It sounds fake, like a lie. Dan is a terrible liar, Jack has no idea how he used to be so successful. Dan raises his eyebrows apologetically, aware he’s not being convincing.

Jack says, “Tell him to read The New York Times.” Felix sighs dramatically. “Just once. On a Thursday, they publish the missed connections on a Thursday.”

Dan keeps his eyebrows raised. “What’s a missed connection?”

“Me and Mark,” Jack replies. “ _We’re_ a missed connection.”

\---

Jack had kissed Mark, for the first time (he hoped the first time, hoped it was a kiss that he could look back on happily, a kiss that he could say _hey remember when I kissed you on that roof?_ about and Mark would smile) on the rooftop of a building next to Kelvingrove Art Gallery. It was cold and Mark’s cheeks, when Jack touched his hands to them, felt icy through his gloves. He ran his fingertips across Mark’s jaw, up and down Mark’s sides, like he could make him warm. The kiss was slow and telegraphed because Jack wanted to give Mark the chance to push him away, if he wanted to, because of course he would want to, but Mark hadn’t.

Mark gasped like he was surprised and Jack mumbled, somewhere between Mark’s bottom lip and chin, “This isn’t surprising. You can’t honestly be surprised.”

Mark whispered, “I didn’t know,” and, like all of Mark’s whispers, it echoed right around them. The people down on the street could probably hear. It wasn’t a _me too_ , he didn’t wrap his fingers around Jack’s wrists to hold him in place or any of the things that Jack wanted him to do or say. “I didn’t think. I don’t think-”

Jack said, “I couldn’t let you leave the gallery without me. On New York Movie. I just wanted to-”

“Come with me,” Mark interrupted. “For the excitement and the lifestyle and everything. Is it what you thought it would be?”

Jack frowned. His breath came in clouds that caught in Mark’s hair. “What do you mean?”

“For the excitement,” Mark repeated. “And the lifestyle. Not necessarily me. It could have been Dan, or PJ, or Louise, or-”

“It wasn’t. It was you.”

“That’s just a matter of timing. It could have been anyone, stealing that painting. You still would have seen the opportunity to go. Which is fine, but, we- we haven’t really- _you_ haven’t really- you don’t have to be nice to me about it.”

Jack, at a loss of what else to say, said, “ _Nice_ to you?” and felt suddenly awkward, standing ankle deep in rooftop snow with Mark’s face cradled in his hands. “I’m not being nice to you, you’re being nice to me, you’re always too nice to me. You’re too nice to everyone.”

Mark huffed. “Not all the time,” and Jack removed his hands, stuffed them back into his pockets in case they reached out again.

\---

Jack’s leaving for work when his computer trills with a Skype call. He knocks over the entire contents of his coffee table and then everything from his windowsill in his attempt to answer and doesn’t even hide his disappointment that it’s Dan.

“Sorry,” Dan says, instantly. “I just wanted to tell you that I passed on your message.”

“So you _are_ speaking to him.”

“Of course.” Dan sounds apologetic at least. “I told him, about the newspaper. He said he doesn’t read them.”

“I know that.”

“He said that he’ll try. And that he didn’t think you’d be there.”

Jack says, “He’s known where I am for three months. This is where we’re supposed to meet.”

Dan turns back and forth in his desk chair, in and out of frame. “He thinks,” he says, “That you wanted to escape from your boring life.”

“I did,” Jack replies.

Dan stops turning. “Right. I mean, he thinks that you _just_ wanted to escape from your boring life.”

“That’s not all of it. I wanted to escape but I also just wanted him. Want him.” Jack isn’t sure why he’s saying any of this. He and Dan aren’t friends. The little he’s seen and heard of Dan before now has just made him envious. Dan with his great track record and great hair and great love story. The security guard, Felix said, had loved Dan back. There was a huge rumour that he’d helped Dan escape. Jack had clung onto every tiny detail with all the attention he could give. “I’ve been telling him.”

“Yeah,” Dan says, “In things that he doesn’t read.”

“He’s supposed to be meeting me,” Jack exclaims, voice finally at full volume. “Here. He’s supposed to be meeting me _here_.”

“He was finding it hard to-”

“Would you leave _him_ waiting, like this, would-” Dan gives the screen a suddenly cold look. “I mean, I’m sorry, I just- I heard things, and-”

“It’s a different situation. And also none of your business. And, to him, he’s not leaving you _waiting_ , he’s trying to set you _free_ , because he felt like you were staying with him for _loyalty_ -”

“It’s not just loyalty,” Jack says. “I love him.”

“Put that in one of your missed connections,” Dan replies. “Rather than all this poetic shit.”

“It’s not-”

Dan disconnects the call.

\---

_Me: bored looking tour guide, my hair was green but it isn’t anymore. You: loud, American, red hair. I saw you at New York Movie, you looked at me and I loved you. I thought I was shouting it at you but apparently you couldn’t hear me. That’s a first. Meet me in New York. Whenever you want. A message from Jack_.

Maya says, “That’s very traditional,” and doesn’t ask him to read it again.

\---

Modern Rome had almost become a joke. A painting that had been on Felix’s list for so long that it had moved to three seperate galleries and gone up for auction twice. No one would go near it. It was in the National, for one, a place that was almost impossible to steal from, hung in a room by itself and had its own personal guard force.

Jack had stolen it anyway.

He can’t even remember why. Maybe it had been hearing about Dan and the security guard, and how that job had ended. Maybe it had been how Mark looked, in London in the cold, wrapped in burgundy scarves and helping old ladies over patches of ice. Maybe it was that they weren’t talking about Scotland. Maybe it had been because, in the National, Mark had looked at the painting and said _hey that’s beautiful_ and Jack’s heart could only respond with _I’ll get it for you_.

Mark, in the hotel, looked at Modern Rome and did not say _hey that’s beautiful_. He said, instead, “What’s this?”

Jack, masterpiece in his arms, said, “It’s the painting. It’s Modern Rome.”

“Was the job we’re here for not exciting enough for you?”

“It’s not that, you said it was beautiful.”

“I think lots of things are beautiful, you don’t have to steal them.” Mark stopped and added, “For me.” Like a question. For me?

“For you,” Jack agreed.

“ _Why_?” Mark said, before he gave himself a visible shake. “We have to leave. Right now. We have to go, that’s a fifty million dollar painting Jack, _fifty million_ , we can’t sit with it in our hotel room, why did you-”

“Because I love you.”

Mark laughed, which wasn’t the reaction Jack had expected, in all the ways he’d practised this. It wasn’t Mark’s normal laugh. “You don’t. You love _this_. The jobs and the drama and your fake name and the different places. Not _me_ , not me at all.”

“That’s not true. That’s not it at all.”

“We need to leave.”

“You’re not listening to what I’m saying.”

Mark, suddenly very close, gripped Jack’s shoulders, Modern Rome crushed between them. “I’m listening. I always am.”

“I said that I-”

“I heard what you said.”

“You don’t believe me.”

Mark didn’t answer. He didn’t answer until the painting was packed in a suitcase, until they were checking out of a hotel they’d just checked into (not suspicious at all), until they were halfway to the tube and Jack slipped on the melted snow across the pavement only for Mark to grab at his elbow and say, “I wished that we could stay on the Isle of Man forever. I wanted to. I wanted you to want to. But it would be boring. For you, not for me. I’m not- I’m probably holding you back at this point. I’m not very good at this. I never was. I’m too loud and I’m too obvious. You noticed me as soon as you saw me.”

“Because of _you_ ,” Jack protested.

But then they were in the tube station, Jack wheeling a suitcase with a fifty million dollar Roman landscape inside, and that had been when Mark said _I’m going to take a break. For a while. I think you should too_. Jack couldn’t say anything in reply, nothing at all, everything was battling against the sense that the situation had gotten away from him, that nothing had turned out the way he’d wanted it to.

He called Mark’s phone when he reached Camden, said, “I wanted to stay on the Isle of Man too. Why don’t we go there? We could go there. I don’t care about this, any of this. I only wanted to be around you,” but Mark’s phone, of course, would be at the bottom of the Thames by now, Jack’s message with it.

Another message that Mark would never get.

Jack stayed the night in the Camden flat, vaguely aware of someone moving in the rooms above him, and left the next morning, Modern Rome propped up on the living room sofa.

The job didn’t matter. The job had never mattered. Mark could have been anyone, a teacher, a carpenter, a musician, anyone, and Jack would still have said _take me with you_. The job has never been exciting to him, he could steal every painting in the world (and he probably _could_ ) but it still wouldn’t come anywhere close to what being around Mark feels like.

“I’m in New York,” he told Felix, two days later. “Can you get me a job in the Met?”

Felix said, “The _Met?_ ” in a very confused way. “Did I send you there?”

“No, I want a job there. A proper job. I might be there for a little while.”

He didn’t rehearse what he would say if he saw Mark again, didn’t plan what he would do. None of his rehearsals had gone to plan so far.

\---

Jack kept his phone. He’d heard that Dan still had his burner phone, from the job, the job where it all happened, just in case, so he did the same. It was always fully charged and on the highest volume. No one ever called it..

“I get it,” he tells Felix. “He thought I just wanted to have adventures and an exciting life and everything. I understand it all, looking back.”.

“I could have told you that,” Felix says, sipping a terrible looking cocktail with gold leaf particles in. “Mark doesn’t take risks, he’s steady and reliable. He’d never done anything out of the blue until he suddenly showed up with you.”.

“I begged him to take me with him.”.

“That didn’t mean that he had to do it. For two really fucking loud people you’re both terrible at actually saying what you mean.”.

Jack checks the Times every day, even though he knows that the missed connections only appear once a week. His had printed in the centre of the page, in the biggest and boldest font possible, even though he hadn’t requested it and definitely hadn’t paid extra for it.

He doesn’t check Felix’s safety deposit box at all. Felix barely seems to notice.

\---

_Me: loud, but working on my inside voice. My hair isn’t red anymore. You: loud, absolutely not working on your inside voice. I saw you at New York Movie, you looked at me and I loved you. How did you not know that. How did I not know it back. It sounds like we both didn’t know much at all. I’m terrible at these. Wait for me. I’m on my way. A message from Mark_.

Jack stares, looks at the person next to him on the subway, reading the same paper. He wants to ask, _hey, are you reading this? Is it real? Can you see this?_ To say _that’s about me_. He touches his fingertip to every letter. _Wait for me_. He laughs out loud, joyfully (no one even looks. He doesn’t care), tapping his index finger against _Wait_.

“That was for you?” Maya says. “I knew it was! I knew it when he called.”

“You spoke to him?” The break room is crowded. People are probably eavesdropping. Jack doesn’t lower his voice. “How did he sound? Was he okay?”

"He sounded pretty happy to me.”

“I’ve been waiting,” Jack tells her. “For almost three months. And he wrote _wait for me_ , like he didn’t think I would be doing that. Like I would have left.” He’s not going to leave the Met, he decides. He lives there now. He’ll sleep in the break room. “I need to think about how to do it. I should wait outside, I want it to be outside, on the steps, he can hold his arm out and I’ll say something perfect and cool and he-”

“You want me to put all this in a missed connection?”

“No,” Jack says. “I’m not doing those anymore.”

There’s a spot on the steps of the Met where the sun hits just right and you can look directly down at it from one of the benches and that, Jack decides, is where he wants to see Mark again. Haloed in the sun. Mark can pause there and when he does Jack will stand up from the bench and say, “What took you so long?” when he means, “What took us so long?” and they’ll walk to each other at the same time and then-

\---

It doesn’t happen like that at all in the end. He’s in the middle of a tour group, his usual speech. “The main themes of Edward Hopper’s paintings are solitude, regret and loneliness-” and on loneliness, suddenly, there’s Mark. He smiles and Jack blinks stars from his eyes. “Sorry, the tour’s over. There’s been a sudden- it’s just over, sorry.”

He leaves the group of confused tourists behind and walks to Mark, who has placed himself in the quietest corner of the room, even if it won’t be the quietest corner much longer. Mark’s hair isn’t red and this, for some reason, is the first thing Jack says, swiping the side of his hand into Mark’s fringe. “It’s brown.”

“That’s the first thing you’re saying?” Mark says, still smiling. “That’s what we’re starting with. After everything?” He nods at Jack’s hair. “So is yours.”

“We still match.”

“We still match,” Mark echoes. He shifts, foot to foot. “How have you been?”

The opportunity to say his perfect and cool thing finally arrives but Jack can only say the truth. “How have I been? I’ve been sitting on gallery steps and walking through gallery hallways and waiting on gallery benches and wishing I was with you.”

Mark touches the side of Jack’s face. “That sounds pretty similar to what I’ve been doing.”

“You said we should take a break.”

“I didn’t want you to think that you were stuck with me just because I was the one who took you with me.”

“I _want_ to be stuck with you.”

Mark says, “Yeah, I read about that. Finally. All your messages. Why didn’t you just say those things out loud? To me?”

“I _did_. Why didn’t you say anything either?”

“I _did_ ,” Mark replies. “I thought I was just- I thought you were just taking the opportunity to get away from that job but then I was the opportunity and that maybe you were too polite to leave even though you’re way better at this than I’ll ever be.”

“I kissed you,” Jack points out. “On the roof, in Scotland.”

His tour group, from behind him, gasp. Half of the gallery gasps. Someone says _aww!_

“Our inside voices still need work,” Mark whispers. Or doesn’t whisper. “And I thought you were being nice. I told you. I thought you were being _nice_.”

“I’m not an entirely nice person.”

“I disagree.”

“You’re biased,” Jack says. “I think.”

“I absolutely am.”

“I wanted to stay on the Isle of Man forever too. We could do that.”

“Really?” Mark wrinkles his nose, but he’s smiling. He hasn’t stopped smiling. Jack touches his thumbs to the crinkles around his eyes. “You wouldn’t miss all this?”

“No,” Jack says. “I only missed you.”

\---

He quits his job and returns the miniature Henry Moore sculpture that he’d been keeping in his locker (as security. In case he needed it). He does all of these things with his hand clinging to Mark’s sleeve while Mark, slightly awestruck, says _just hold my hand what are you doing_ but, somehow, Jack wants to save that. He wants to save all of these firsts. He doesn’t want to do them in the Met while he’s handing back his staff pass.

“Another thing.” He passes his security badge in at reception. “My name isn’t Jack. Not really.”

“I know. It’s Sean.”

Jack freezes, lets his pass fall through his fingers onto the desk. “You _knew_ that?”

“You told me to call you Jack.” Mark’s eyes flicker over Jack’s face, concerned. “Do you want me to call you Sean instead?”

Sean had fallen in love with a loud American on sight and tried, every day, to try and make the loud American love him back. Jack had actually managed it.

“No,” Jack says. “I want you to call me Jack.” 

\---

Jack holds Mark’s hand when they reach the end of Fifth Avenue. On the subway he smooths out Mark’s frown lines with his index finger. Two stops from home he pulls at Mark’s shirt collar, tries to get Mark closer to him when it isn’t possible for Mark to actually be any closer. Later, Mark is so huge in Jack’s tiny shoebox of an apartment that Jack can’t stop touching him, tracking the wingspan of Mark’s shoulders with his palms, feeling the solid weight of him, the warmth of his chest when it pressed against Jack’s, and then the surprisingly light flutter of his heartbeat, so fast that it feels like it could jump into Mark’s throat, that Jack could catch it when he kisses him.

When he kisses him Mark gasps like he’s surprised, but that it’s a wonderful surprise, that everything he wanted is somehow here. It’s a gasp so full of love (and awe, almost) that Jack has to flatten his hand across Mark’s fringe and say _it’s just me_ while Mark opens his mouth on Jack’s collarbone and whispers _that’s the point_. A whisper that’s more of a shout.

\---

In the morning Jack says, “So! The Isle of Man!” trying to remind Mark before Mark forgets. He’s not sure if he’ll ever get out of the habit of reminding Mark of things. “I can look into it, we’d have to get a flight to-”

Mark pushes his nose into Jack’s neck. “Actually I thought we could do one last job. I sorta promised someone we would. As a favour.”

Jack blinks, watches Mark raise himself up onto his elbows. “What’s the job?”

“Have you ever heard of a painting called Llama in Meadow?”

\---

_I’m sending this via email because I’m on a plane to London right now. You can print this anyway you want, in any font you want, or you don’t have to print it at all. Also my address is underneath. There’s a few Renoirs in my apartment, please return them to the MoMA_.

_Us: loud, bright hair, missing something but finding something else. At New York Movie, we loved each other. The thing about being loud is that you always assume that the other person can hear you. That’s not always the case. But don’t worry, they’ll hear you eventually_

**Author's Note:**

> \- this is a tiny alternate timeline which was actually the original plot for jack and mark in the art thief fic, before i changed it. this probably now only exists in jack's dreams, sorry jack :(
> 
> \- to read it in line with i don't blame you much, this takes place in the period of time between the taking of Modern Rome and the start of the llama job. in another universe, jack and mark worked surveillance together on that job and probably tried very hard to improve their inside voices. 
> 
> (i'm on tumblr [here](https://leblonde.tumblr.com/), come say hi!)


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